This Birthday Is Brought To You By Sunshine and Good Food
Slow Cooker French Onion Soup + Sesame Chicken Salad with Tahini Dressing + Chocolate Buttermilk Cake with Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting
Welcome to Let’s Get Lost! I’m Rebecca, a recipe developer, food photographer, passionate people watcher, and chaser of new experiences. You might know me from my recipe websites, Of Batter and Dough and A Little and A Lot.
My husband and I are nomads without a home base but with many modes of transportation, namely an RV, a motorcycle, and a sailboat. I write recipes and stories for curious people who believe experiences are more important than things and who want more adventure.
Happy Two Year Birthday to Let’s Get Lost!
A crazy realization hit me earlier this week: I sent out the first issue of Let’s Get Lost on February 3, 2024, which means I’ve been publishing here on Substack for 2 years!
When I joined Substack, I’d been publishing recipes to two recipe websites for over 10 years. I loved my job - I still love my job - but, I was bristling against the confines and unpredictability of relying on Google to send readers my way.
I wanted to write more about our life as full time travelers and publish more recipes inspired by the places we visit. I thought that Substack might be a good platform for that.
What I didn’t expect was the relationships that would form as a direct result of writing here. Over the past two years I’ve gotten to know many of you, some of whom I’ve gotten to hang out with in person!
I’ve formed tight bonds with other cooks, writers, recipe developers, and artists who are here for many of the same reasons I am - to perfect our craft, create beautiful things, and form real relationships. These are things that have perhaps always been hard to come by, but that seem especially rare today.
If this is your first issue, welcome. I send out a new issue every Saturday. My husband and I are nomads without a home base but with many modes of transportation, namely an RV, a motorcycle, and a sailboat. I write recipes and stories for curious people who believe experiences are more important than things and who want more adventure.
In addition to sharing recipes, I write about life on the road and on the water and what it means to navigate the conflicting desires for freedom and community, autonomy and connection, stability and adventure. The human experience is fraught with contradiction and life on the road has a way of laying that bare.
I write with as much honesty as I can muster. I am an optimist to the core even when life is unbearable. I am driven by freedom, new experiences, creativity, and words.
And I am glad that you’re here.
Hello San Diego. We’ve missed you.
Last weekend we traveled from Colorado to one of of our favorite places - San Diego. We did the drive in two days, 14 hours the first day and 6 hours the next, and arrived at our RV resort in the middle of a gorgeous sunny afternoon with plenty of daylight to get parked, set up, and settled in.
The first time we spent any real time in San Diego was in February 2021. We’d been on the road for about 10 months and, after having lived in Colorado for our whole lives, we were ecstatic to be somewhere warm and sunny in the middle of the winter.
One evening we discovered Sunset Cliffs and I snapped this photo:
I had the photo printed, put it in a frame, and hung it on the wall next to the sofa.
Last weekend, we got on the motorcycle and rode to Sunset Cliffs to do what you’re supposed to do there: watch the sunset. I reminded Steve that we were looking at the same view as the photo on our wall and we realized it had been 5 years almost to the day since that photo was taken.
And you know what? We are STILL just as ecstatic to be in Southern California in the middle of winter.
A short tour of this publication in 6 photos
In two years of writing this newsletter, I’ve published over 120 issues and somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 recipes. Scroll through the archive of past issues here.
Every issue is free for all subscribers thanks to everyone in The Lost Supper Club, who have chosen to spend $35 a year on a paid subscription. As a thank you, I try to provide those paid subscribers with some cool stuff, including 3 free cookbooks.
Last year, I hosted 24 LIVE cooking classes. Here’s where you’ll find the replays for those classes. More classes are coming later this year!
Last year I also started publishing People Watching stories, illustrated fictional tales inspired by real people we’ve seen while traveling around the country. These have been so fun to write and I look forward to sharing more this year!
In January of 2025, I started a mastermind group for food writers that has grown to almost 300 members and now includes 3 free monthly meetings. If you are a food writer on Substack, you are invited!
This is where you’ll find more about me, links to my two recipe websites, some photos from our life on the road and the water, information about paid subscriber perks, and my thoughts about the subscription model, which isn’t perfect but has it’s benefits.
This Week’s Menu!
Slow Cooker French Onion Soup + Sesame Chicken Salad with Tahini Dressing + Chocolate Buttermilk Cake with Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting
Slow Cooker French Onion Soup
Traditionally, French onion soup is made by cooking onions for a long time on the stove top over low heat until they are rich golden brown. This makes a delicious, flavorful broth, but it’s also time consuming and requires you to be attentive for the several hours that the onions are cooking.
Cooking the onions in a slow cooker is much easier and makes a rich and flavorful soup with minimal hands-on effort. In fact, I often set my slow cooker to cook the onions overnight, while we sleep.
The challenge with most slow cooker french onion soup recipes is that the end result doesn’t have the same amount of richness and complex flavor as when the soup is cooked for a few hours on the stovetop.
To solve this problem, this recipe calls for cooking the onions in the slow cooker until they are deeply caramelized and then finishing the soup on the stovetop. The combination of slow cooker and stovetop cooking gives you the best of both worlds - rich, complex flavor and very little hands-on time.
This process also allows you to cook the onions up to 3 days in advance if you like.
This recipe is unfussy, easy to adapt to your schedule, and still delivers cozy, deliciously flavorful, cheese covered bowls of French onion soup. What could be better than that?
Sesame Chicken Salad with Tahini Dressing
Every bite of this creamy-without-the-cream chicken salad is an interesting combination of flavors and textures. It’s easy to make, keeps well in the refrigerator for up to 3 days, and is especially well suited to meals on the go.
In fact, this is one of favorite travel day meals. I pack it into mason jars, tuck them into a small cooler that sits in the back seat of our truck, and it makes a delicious high protein lunch on days when we’re driving around the country from one campground to the next and want to save ourselves from truck stop food.
But you don’t need to wait for a to-go situation to try this spicy, sesame and tahini flavored chicken salad. Serve it on greens or toast, if you like. But we like to eat it just as it’s pictured here, piled into bowls with extra peanuts and sesame seeds.
Chocolate Buttermilk Cake with Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting
This is the kind of chocolate cake you bake when you want something really good but super basic, decadent and deeply chocolate, but requiring minimal time and effort. It’s no frills, no surprises, nothing fancy, and yet completely and utterly satisfying in the way only a really good chocolate cake can be.
The hands-on time it takes to make this cake, including the chocolate cream cheese frosting, is about 30 minutes, not including the time it takes to wash your dishes or clean up your kitchen if you’re a messy baker, like me. 🙂
This newsletter would not exist if not for the members of The Lost Supper Club, who show their support with a paid subscription thus ensuring that the vast majority of readers can keep reading this newsletter for free. As a thank you, I try to provide those paid subscribers with some cool stuff, including some exclusive recipes. Find out more about becoming a member of the Lost Supper Club.
Once a month, my friend Betty Williams sends out a dinner party post that includes recipes, conversation-starting questions, and even a Spotify playlist. The goal is to make it easy to throw a casual dinner party and this month’s theme revolves around one of my favorite books and television series - A Gentleman in Moscow!
I read the book years ago and was captured by the main character’s love of good food and the author’s mouth watering descriptions of everything he ate! One of the dishes that made my mouth water was Latvian Stew. I couldn’t find a recipe, so I did some research and created one. Betty included that recipe in this dinner party plan along with recipes for Cucumber Dill Salad, Russian-Style Caraway Rye Bread, Napoleon Dessert, and Elderflower Martinis!
This post is exclusively for Betty’s paid subscribers BUT if you’re one of MY paid subscribers, you get it too! Send Betty a direct message and she’ll give you access!
And speaking of Betty, join us later this month for…
And, because today is Valentine’s Day and one can never have too much chocolate…
❤️ Did you know that if you hit the heart or recycle symbol at the top or bottom of this post, it makes it easier for other people to find this newsletter?
Happy 2 years! 🎉🥂 Amazing accomplishments in that time and so much more to come! 🙌 So glad to have connected with you here on Substack and in real life 💞
You are a generous and prolific contributer to this platform and we are so lucky to have you!!
Congratulations on 2 years here🎉